The weirdest thing about the PBM play is that the Medical Loss Ratio gives them the freedom to arbitrarily increase profit values without doing anything weird, because you can just not put any downward pressure on costs and they will just naturally rise.

Which of course means that these companies are not satisfied with a free ticket to arbitrary profit values, and have other motivations than just having all the money.

There's an aspect of "We also want to control things" to it.